Reverse Engineering Internet MIBs

The Internet-standard management protocol SNMP manipulates data structures that are defined in MIB modules. A large number of MIB modules has been defined over the last decade. Some of them are rather complex and full of technical details, which makes it hard to understand them. Furthermore, the limitations of the current data definition language make it impossible to formally express the conceptual model underlying a well-engineered MIB module. This paper presents a reverse engineering algorithm which extracts conceptual models from the MIB data definitions. The algorithm uses several heuristics that are derived from common MIB naming and registration conventions. The output produced by the algorithm is a graphical representation for conceptual MIB models, which is a slightly customized version of a UML class diagram. A prototype implementation of the algorithm is briefly described which has been integrated into the libsmi software package.